


Prompt 11 (Lennox 2)

by Yoselin



Series: L&L Tumblr Prompts [12]
Category: Love & Legends (Visual Novel)
Genre: F/M, Graphic Violence, Kidnapping, Stockholm Syndrome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-27
Updated: 2018-03-27
Packaged: 2019-04-13 12:50:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14112708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yoselin/pseuds/Yoselin
Summary: Originally posted to Tumblr.A prologue to the first Lennox Prompt posted.Prompt: “I hate you.”





	Prompt 11 (Lennox 2)

A kind of prologue to the first Lennox one I posted.   
Severe warnings for violence.   
——  
I was taken in the dark.   
The moon had just come out to grace the world with its presence, moonbeams peeking out shyly through the tree tops, and stars dazzling in the midnight sky like thousands of fluorescent lights, when I had decided to take a walk. I had strayed far from the base Reiner had set up, knew I should have turned back when the sounds of the soldiers had drifted distant in the breeze, yet had remained all the same.   
After being cooped up in a tent all day listening to battle plans that put me back in a boring history classroom in high school, a walk had seemed like the perfect solution.   
My plan had been to just walk through the small woods near the base and take in the night air. Perhaps I would have walked around the woods and observed the nightlife around me, so different from the one of Chicago’s clubs and buzzing bars, before turning back and going to bed content. I hadn’t really thought out my plan for the night-  
And had never had a chance to.   
As I had walked through the woods, a strong arm had been wrapped around me. Something cold had pressed to my throat and I was being yanked back.   
A voice I had only heard in the battlefield had pressed to my ears and had cut trough the tranquility the forest had provided.   
“Scream and I’ll kill you.”  
Five words that had changed my life forever. Fear had overtaken me, drowned me like a Hurricane, and I had been unable to speak.   
In the movies, the heroes free themselves from their assailant. They perform some karate moves that the average movie goer can only dream of.   
But this wasn’t a movie.   
Rather than fight, I had cowered. My body had locked up in shock and I had become easy prey. Lennox had kept the blade at my throat and ushered me away.   
I had held my breath, too fearful of the tight way the knife was pressing into my neck, and let him take me.   
With just a stupid walk, I had become a prisoner of war. 

From there, life had taken a downwards spiral.   
Time had drifted past the window of my cell. I had kept track with tally marks on the wall. The white scrapes against the rock had served as a calendar to remind me that my friends were coming soon.   
The Generals came to visit with every tally I drew. They interrogated me, tortured me, and almost killed me. Their treatments were inhumane, cruel, and made me wonder if survival was possible.   
At first, I endured.   
Whatever Lennox and the other Generals did to me, I held out. I wasn’t strong like my friends, their torture hurt me in ways that made me wish I was dead, but I kept my mouth shut. My silence, I had decided, would hold out even if my sanity gave up.   
However, after the tally marks on the wall became a mural of freedom lost and evaporating hope, I had begun to crack.   
It had been a month since I had been taken, yet Reiner had never arrived.   
Once, just once, I thought I had heard the sounds of August’s voice outside the dungeon I was being held in, swore I could taste the scent of Altea’s magic in the air, but nothing had ever come out of that. The feeling had passed like a storm cloud and my prison had remained.   
After that, my hope had fallen apart. I would never be rescued, I knew that deep within me, so I focused on saving myself.   
I hated the damsel in distress trope, so I decided to be my own hero. 

Three months into my kidnapping and I had been declared a dead end by the Generals. Magnus had deemed me useless, as I had not been around military strategy enough to help them, and had coldly suggested passing me on to one of his comrades as a gift.   
Like a hand-me-down, I had been passed off to my kidnapper.   
Lennox had won me like a prize. Since he had been the one to steal me away all those months ago, Magnus found it fitting for him to put up with me. I was taken into his possession immediately, and he made sure I knew I was nothing more than an animated trinket.   
My life was as insignificant as that of a scuttling insect on the ground. I was little more than a slave.   
Whatever order Lennox issued, I obeyed. Whatever he wished to do, I had to endure. Whatever he said, I had to agree to.   
My life was in his hands. He fancied himself a god because of this fact. His favorite little game was to frighten me. Several times he would corner me, threaten to kill me and go as far as to nearly make me black out with blood loss, before growing bored with me.   
I endured this.   
The thought that one day I would be free was what kept me growing. I was willing to put up with everything if it meant being able to escape. 

And that chance came soon.   
One evening, in the midst of cleaning Lennox’s room and ordering his documents, my opportunity had arisen like the rise of dawn.   
Lennox had been called away to an emergency meeting with the Generals, something about a cultist of his attacking Reiner’s soldiers and causing a skirmish, and he had flown out the door with an order to stay put. In his desperation to get to the meeting, he had forgotten to lock the door as he often did.   
I had waited in the room, hands knotted into my skirts, and had counted to a hundred. When his footsteps hadn’t sounded, when he hadn’t come back to right his mistake, I had leapt into action.   
I had flung myself out the door and ran as fast as possible. The palace wasn’t very populated or guarded, my freedom was relatively easy.   
I had bolted right out the palace and into the grounds. The sunlight had touched my skin for the first time in months and I had been determined to navigate my way back to the human domain.   
My hands had flown around me, my lungs had burned, and there had been a painful stitch at my side that threatened to interfere with my escape, but I had powered through.   
I had made it to the woods, found solace in the trees that promised a place to hide, before sinking to my knees in exhaustion.   
My breath had been caught in my throat and my hands had dug into my chest in an attempt to free it.   
After months of being a prisoner, I was free.   
Liberty had felt like nothing I had ever experienced. No one knows freedom until they’ve survived captivity. The feelings that had washed over me then had been as beautiful as the terra firma around me-  
And as short lived as its seasons.   
Loud voices had sounded all around me. Cultists had quickly been deployed to find me as soon as Lennox had remembered he had left the door open, and they had found me.   
I had tried to run then but my body was so tired. Despite the panic and adrenaline surging through me, arms had grabbed me and I had been unable to evade them.   
I had fought, clawed and resisted against the cultists, yet had been brought back all the same.   
Lennox had been waiting for me in his room when I arrived. His amber eyes were burning with a wrath I had never before seen, and his hands were holding a large knife.   
My voice had evaded me and left me just like my freedom and hope. I had, had nothing to defend myself as he had advanced on me. My screams had even been unreachable.   
He had cut me, nearly killed me, and torn me to shreds. My hands could only protect my head and neck from his assault. I had squeezed my eyes shut and willed myself to be somewhere else.   
Hours I had endured it. I had blacked out twice before he had roused me awake and continued his assault. Finally, when midnight had fallen over the castle like a cloak, he had stopped.   
I had thought his anger had subsided, as he looked neural and impassive, but had been wrong.   
He had forced me on the ground and hovered above me. His leg had pressed into mine until it hurt. He had grinned, a sadistic smile that had chilled me to my very core, and had said he knew a fitting punishment for my escape.   
“Jinhai often clips the wings of the birds that resist his powers. He keeps them at his side until they are willing to listen. I will clip your wings and you will learn to listen to me.”  
His words had barely registered in my mind before he had brought his leg down with full force.   
The first kick had bruised my knee, the second had drawn a tattered scream from my throat, but the third had shattered the bone.   
He had continued his assault until my leg was nothing but a fractured mess.   
The pain had been worse than the hour long torture. I had blacked out as soon as the bone had broken, fully expecting to never wake up again. 

I wasn’t so lucky.   
When I had come to, a potion was being spilled into my mouth. I nearly choked on it until his hands had yanked my hair back and I had been forced to drink it all.   
The cold and bitter taste of magic had washed over me and some of the pain in my leg had subsided. Asides from the pain, I had been unable to feel anything in it. The bone was damaged beyond repair.   
Tears had streamed down my face and I had squeezed my eyes shut. My hands had shaken as I had laid them against the cast he had wrapped around the knee. It was poorly made, and it served to render me immobilized more than it did to help me heal.   
The breaking of my leg had represented the breaking of my hope. My escape had faded in a plume of smoke and had left nothing but cold despair in its wake.   
Then and there, I had given up hope of ever escaping. My body had been wrought with sobs and pain. I had cried until there were no more tears.   
Lennox had let me. His eyes had regarded me with mild interest and no remorse. He had allowed me to mourn for my lost freedom before moving away from me.   
The potion he had fed me had gone back into his pocket and he had declared he could fix me. A broken bone was nothing a simple vial of magic couldn’t mend, my fracture was no exception, but he would not give it to me if I wasn’t willing to pledge loyalty.   
“Promise me you won’t escape again and it’s yours.” He had patted his pocket.   
At his words, I had quivered with rage and the aftermath of my broken psyche. **”I hate you!”**  
I had nothing to fling at him, nothing to hit him with, so I just assaulted him with my words. My rage had served as a weapon and I had screamed at him until I was sure my vocal cords would give out.   
Eventually, my tirade had crumbled and I had fallen apart a second time. The pain was returning full force and it threatened to kill me. I had never broken a bone before, but even I could tell this fracture was worse than a regular bone fracture. He had probably done something to it so that I would be forever unable to walk right without his proposition.   
In the midst of pain and heartache, I had drifted off to sleep. My hands had pressed to the cast on my knee in an attempt to shield it from another attack, and my head had lolled down. 

When I had awoken a second time, it was because Lennox was bringing me a meal. In my state, I couldn’t walk to the servant’s kitchen, so he had made it his mission to feed me.   
As he had shoved the food in my hands, he had clenched his jaw.   
“This is just so you won’t starve. I don’t want to lose my slave before I have a chance to replace you,” he had hissed.   
I had bitten back a retort, painfully aware that I was now completely at his mercy, and had settled for simply trying to eat. The problem was that he had set the utensils too far from me. I couldn’t reach them no matter how much I tried.   
After the fifth attempt, I had knocked the spoon to the ground. My teeth had closed around my cheek in frustration and I had just about decided to eat without a spoon-  
When Lennox had grumbled something about me being useless and had picked it up for me. I had reached for it in his grasp but he had moved it away. He had clicked his tongue, said he might as well treat me like the child I acted like, and had fed me himself.   
At first it had been mortifying to be fed by someone I hated so badly, but then I had begun to realize something.   
Lennox didn’t have to do this, yet he did. He could have left me starve, could have left me to fend for my own devices, but he was actively trying to keep me alive.   
The thought had brought a monsoon in my head. I had spent the last few months with only the desire of survival keeping me warm at night, yet here he was offering me that chance. If I let him, would he help me keep my life?  
The question had settled around me and had brought much mental debate.   
On one hand, Lennox was a monster that had broken me in more ways than one and reduced me to something that needed him to operate.   
On the other hand, he was also taking the time to nurse me back to health. My well-being was being considered in ways I had never felt before. If I let him, I could easily make a full recovery.   
The choice between the two was a hard struggle. 

As weeks trickled by, the choice persisted. It kept me up at night and chased me around in the morning.   
My leg still hadn’t healed, Lennox said it wouldn’t without the potion he had, and I was growing desperate.   
More than that, I was growing insane. Being cooped up in his room with nothing to do but elevate the cast was making me stir crazy. I wanted so badly to walk and move around, but my leg refused to cooperate.   
I wondered how I would endure more weeks of this. My sanity was as fragile as the bones in my leg, and I could feel it slip past my fingers. With every passing day, more of it crumbled and fell away.   
I tried to hold on to it, tried to reel it in and preserve it, yet it was moving too fast for me.   
My hope had left, my freedom had followed, and now my sanity was on its way too.   
I so was desperate for a lifeline, something to hold on to in order to keep myself from being lost to the madness encroaching my mind-  
That I snapped.   
In a bid to keep myself sane, I latched on to something that could steady me.   
Lennox.   
Ever since he had broken me, he had attempted to fix me. He feigned to do it because he wanted to keep me as a slave, but I could see the undercurrent beneath the surface.   
I saw the kindness in him for the first time. I saw it in the way he adjusted my blanket when he thought I was asleep, in the way he murmured a goodnight to me when he was going to bed, and in the way his eyes scanned my leg with something resembling regret.   
I saw the heart that dwelt within the walls he erected around himself, and I reached out to it in an attempt to preserve myself. 

So, after half a year of captivity, I let go.   
I let the last of my old self fall apart, tore everything that was me into tatters, and crafted a new fate.   
I dropped my inhibitions and was prepared to unite myself with my savior.   
When Lennox awoke that morning and got ready to dress, I snagged his arm. He tensed at the contact, blinked down at me still half asleep, and asked me what I wanted.   
I took a deep breath, felt the last of my reservations melt away, and intertwined our fingers together.   
When I next spoke, my words came out steady.   
“I pledge my loyalty to you. I won’t run anymore. Make me yours.”


End file.
